Tom Hoefling:"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people." -- The Tenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution

Those who see the corruption and abuse of power that permeates Washington, DC, while ignoring the corruption in our state capitals, are making a terrible mistake.

Tenth Amendment supporters need to take the time and effort to extend the crucial principles and the indispensable logic of that great amendment to the state level. If powers are not granted by We the People to our state governments via our state constitutions, those powers do not legitimately exist. For the states to claim and exercise them is a lawless usurpation and tyranny.

One last thing: No government, national or otherwise, has any legitimate power to violate the God-given, unalienable, equal rights of the individual person. In the case of those rights, governments - all governments - possess only the absolute, imperative duty to defend. Nothing else. Because the fulfillment of that duty is the primary reason all governments, and all government offices, exist.

That assertion is the foundation stone of our national political creed:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed..." -- The Declaration of Independence

"To claim a right to 'decide' whether or not some individual, or class of individuals, should be protected, is to deny the unalienable, God-given nature of our rights, the basis for the American claim to liberty, the cornerstone for the rule of law, the very raison d'etre of human government, according to our founders: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men...'"-- Tom Hoefling

"If We the People continue to fail to put God, and truth, and principle before personality, party, or process, the republic cannot possibly be saved. But once we begin to do what is right, without compromise, nothing on earth can stand in our way."-- Tom Hoefling

"We were intended to be a righteous, free, self-governing people under God. No matter what anyone else does, no one can stop you from being that in your own world, in your own sphere of influence, but you."

"What is the foundation of the American claim to liberty? It is the unequivocal, forceful assertion of the self-evident truth that all men are created equal, that each person is endowed by God with certain unalienable rights, starting with the right to live, and that human government exists to protect those individual, unalienable rights. Don't marvel at the continued erosion of liberty when so many, including those at the highest levels of politics and the law, have lost their reverence for God, and their care and concern for the lives of the helpless innocents who are made in God's image and likeness. Can a building stand long without its foundations? America, wake up. They're not just slaughtering thousands of little babies in those abortuaries every day. They are destroying your ability to live as a free, self-governing person. They are assuring the destruction and enslavement of your posterity. They are eradicating liberty. They are destroying America."

From today's Patriot Post:"The propitious smiles of Heaven can never be expected on a nation that disregards the eternal rules of order and right, which Heaven itself has ordained." --George Washington, First Inaugural Address, 1789

Tom Hoefling:"Self-evident" means "completely obvious to absolutely everyone," or, to use the modern vernacular, "as-plain-as-the-nose-on-your-face." It's self-evident that all men are CREATED equal, endowed by their Creator with the intrinsic individual right to live. If someone tells you that a baby isn't a person, they're being dishonest, to God and to themselves first and foremost. They know quite well that the child in the womb is a human being, made in the image and likeness of the One Who made us. I don't argue the point with them any more. I simply do what America's founders did: Clearly assert the equal rights of each and every one of these precious little people, and the absolute imperative sworn duty of every officer of government to protect them.

I pray every day that I, and millions of others, will be given the boldness and courage to show the people the absolute injustice of the barbaric, heinous practice of human abortion, and to stop it forever in this country.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men..."

-- The Declaration of Independence

"No person shall be deprived of life without due process of law."

"No State shall deprive any person of life without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

"In my public life I aspire to be naught but a figurehead, for the One Who made us, for self-evident truth, for principle, for right, for We the People, for Posterity, to be the truest representation of the foregoing I can be, in the land of the free, the home of the republican, constitutional form of representative self-government that our forebears sacrificed, and bled, and in some cases died, to give us."

For four hundred years in this country, my family has had a well-earned reputation for being well-armed, and of not being afraid to use those arms if life, liberty, property, or their communities were threatened.

I'm a descendent of Alice Proctor, the wife of Virginia ancient planter John Proctor. In the Indian attacks and massacres of 1622 in which as many as a third of the Virginians were killed, John was in England, and she and her household held off the savages for a month. The British officers threatened to burn down the Proctor Plantation if she didn't remove herself from the frontier back to Pace's Paines, which she then had to do, but the Indians knew better than to ever come anywhere close to her or her family again.

A few generations later, at the start of the Revolution, five Proctor brothers, including my forebear Little Page Proctor, were part of the Virginia militia that secured the NW wilderness against the British-allied tribes. They were among the forty men with Daniel Boone who held off more than 400 Indians for ten days at Boonesborough, in what became Kentucky.

They knew that when it came down to it they had to depend on themselves and their neighbors, not on some far-off government.

Anyone who thinks it is fundamentally any different now is fooling themselves.

We will NOT disarm. Our natural rights, the right of self-defense being foremost, were given to us by God Himself, and Barack Obama and Dianne Feinstein are NOT welcome to them.

“Among the natural rights of the Colonists are these: First, a right to life; Secondly, to liberty; Thirdly, to property; together with the right to support and defend them in the best manner they can."

- Samuel Adams

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men..."

The Second Amendment IS pro-life. "Among the natural rights of the Colonists are these: First, a right to life; Secondly, to liberty; Thirdly, to property; together with the right to support and defend them in the best manner they can. These are evident branches of, rather than deductions from, the duty of self-preservation, commonly called the first law of nature...In short, it is the greatest absurdity to suppose it in the power of one, or any number of men, at the entering into society, to renounce their essential natural rights, or the means of preserving those rights; when the grand end of civil government, from the very nature of its institution, is for the support, protection, and defence of those very rights; the principal of which, as is before observed, are Life, Liberty, and Property. If men, through fear, fraud, or mistake, should in terms renounce or give up any essential natural right, the eternal law of reason and the grand end of society would absolutely vacate such renunciation. The right to freedom being the gift of God Almighty, it is not in the power of man to alienate this gift and voluntarily become a slave." -- Samuel Adams, The Rights of the Colonists

"Parental rights are God-given and unalienable. They must be, because God gave parents explicit duties when it comes to the raising of their children to reverence God and to know His Word. With that absolute God-ordained obligation to our posterity must come rightful, legitimate authority. Compulsory attendance laws, the idea that families can be forced by the state to put their children into government-run indoctrination centers where those precious young souls will be endangered spiritually, morally, and physically, is a gross violation of the natural law. It's an offense against liberty. It's unjust. It's un-American. We must separate school and state, before it is too late."

"When a liberal sees a firearm they see a fearful weapon that they wish only to be in the hands of government, naively ignoring the obvious facts that:

1) Criminals are never going to follow their fond wishes,

2) Officers of government are most often not going to be there for them in a crisis,

3) We the People are the government in America, the sovereign, and the sovereign must possess the physical means to protect their people and their country from all enemies, foreign or domestic.

When a conservative sees a firearm he sees a primary implement of liberty, one that can be misused by evil men, of course, but that is, nonetheless, an indispensable tool, because this is a fallen world which contains many evil men, men who will only be restrained by the will and force of good men who are armed."

"Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add 'within the limits of the law' because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual." "All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression." "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." "The republican is the only form of government which is not eternally at open or secret war with the rights of mankind." "Nothing is unchangeable but the inherent and unalienable rights of man." -- Thomas Jefferson

----- "Protecting the rights of even the least individual among us is basically the only excuse the government has for even existing." "I favor the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and it must be enforced at gunpoint if necessary." -- Ronald Reagan

"The public good is in nothing more essentially interested than in the protection of every individual's private rights."

"Those rights, then, which God and nature have established, and are therefore called natural rights, such as life and liberty, need not the aid of human laws to be more effectually invested in every man than they are; neither do they receive any additional strength when declared by the municipal laws to be inviolate. On the contrary, no human legislature has power to abridge or destroy them, unless the owner shall himself commit some act that amounts to a forfeiture." -- William Blackstone

"... [R]ightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our own will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add 'within the limits of the law,' because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the right of an individual."

"All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression."

Tom Hoefling on Government:"Just as 'good fences make for good neighbors,' good government is mainly about knowing where the legitimate boundaries are, and having the courage to defend those borders forcefully. This is true in terms of the defense of our territory, our security, and our national sovereignty, but it also applies to the sworn duty of all of those in government to equally protect the God-given, unalienable rights of each individual person, from their creation onwards, their sacred obligation to stay well within the enumerated powers of our constitutions, and of the role legitimate government must play in balancing the competing rights and interests of the people, in order to establish justice."